Ha, yeah, intermittent problems are my life story.
I tried the card with 8 different 1MB simms, all of which had worked correctly in my A500 sidecar in the past, in pairs of 8, 4, and 2. At no point with any combination of them (and with the card in different ZII slots) would it boot. I'd get those gibberish messages like posted above, or it would freeze up. However the card works fine with no memory installed, I was even able to use my SCSI card reader and hard drives connected to it (but for whatever reason it wouldn't see my optical drive). The card works with no ram installed and it boots up, but is pretty slow because of the bus. 800K/sec, give-or-take.
Seems like that narrows it down to:
- either one of the first two slots on the HC8+ is bad, where the first memory sticks are required to be inserted. This might be a possibility, and might explain why the seller immediately accepted my relatively low "make an offer" price on ebay. :-/
- some incompatibility between ram on the HC8+ and my GeForce
- some incompatibility between ram on the HC8+ and my motherboard
No real way to test a couple of those options, if I had a spare HC8+ I could swap in, or if I had a complete other A2000 that I could try this one in... Bah. My quest to add a faster SCSI interface to my A2000 project will have to be continued till another day! I should probably also test the HC8+ without my GeForce installed, just to see what happens there...
